Ask a dealer how their website performs and you will usually get a traffic number. Ask how many unit page views it takes to produce one lead and almost nobody knows, because no one in this category publishes a benchmark to measure against.
That is a strange gap, because it is the number that decides everything downstream. It sets your cost per lead. It tells you whether your next marketing dollar should buy traffic or fix the site. And unlike a Lighthouse score, it cannot be measured from the outside — you need the lead data behind the traffic, which means only a platform can produce it.
The headline numbers
- Legacy dealer sites: about 210 unit page views per lead. Drawn from 3.37 million views against 16,142 leads across three dealers’ previous websites.
- Scout sites: about 108 unit page views per lead. Drawn from 2.1 million views against 19,560 leads over 90 days.
- The cleanest comparison: one dealer measured on both sides of the switch on an identical lead definition went from 204 views per lead to 109.
That last figure is the one worth weighting most heavily. Comparing two different sets of dealers always risks comparing two different lead definitions; comparing one dealer with itself, on the same definition, does not.
Why we publish the conservative end
The legacy sites we measured ranged from 161 views per lead to over 900. Publishing the average of that range would have produced a far more flattering number and a far less useful one.
The sites at the high end counted leads more narrowly than the others, so they are excluded from the published figure entirely. The three that remain ran 161, 204 and 228, and we publish 210 — the conservative end of a defensible range rather than the top of an indefensible one.
What it costs you
Across $233,160 of marketing spend against 590,243 unit page views in a single month, the cost of a unit page view worked out at about $0.39.
Run that through the two benchmarks and the difference stops being abstract. At 210 views per lead a lead costs roughly $82 in traffic alone; at 108 it costs roughly $42. On a comparison against another agency running a legacy site we measured the gap at $126 against $42 — three times more per lead, on the same kind of traffic.
A dealer generating 150 leads a month at the wrong end of that range is spending somewhere in the region of six figures a year more than they need to for the same result. That is the actual cost of a brochure site, and it does not appear on any invoice.
How to run this on your own site
- 1Pull total unit detail page views for a full month from your analytics.
- 2Pull unique leads for the same month — deduplicated people, not form submissions. Counting submissions flatters the number by 20–40%.
- 3Divide views by leads. That is your views-per-lead figure.
- 4Divide your total marketing spend for the month by unit page views to get your cost per view, then multiply by views-per-lead for your true traffic cost per lead.
If you land near 108 your site is converting well and your constraint is traffic. If you land near 210 or worse, buying more traffic will raise your cost per lead without moving your lead count much, and the site is the thing to fix.
Methodology
Figures are drawn from a selected sample of dealer accounts and websites over the periods stated. Lead definitions were held constant within each comparison; sites that counted leads more narrowly than the rest of their cohort are excluded from the published figures rather than averaged in. Results vary by market, inventory mix and budget. The same figures are published on wheeleradvertising.com.
Conner Rusch is Director of Operations at Wheeler Advertising, where he leads the team behind the Scout dealer website platform. He started the project after hearing the same thing from RV dealers over and over — the traffic was there, the leads were not. Scout now runs across roughly 40 RV dealerships, and RV News interviewed him about it in May 2026.